and told us, according to the latest science,
if we were good or doomed.

We wanted so badly to be okay,
we did whatever we were told.

Knelt on cold floors before the machine god,
plastic bags with odd pieces of candy

clinging to the sides and the rare rabbit’s foot,
asking for the best track tomorrow,

the flavor of the month, any hint to say
we’ll be fine as long as we can take it,

the vomit never making it out of our mouths
as we swallow.

Prenatal #2

We have never smelled fat spoiling on sand
or seen the bloated belly of a whale heaving,

but we know the power of nausea.
We have this in common with our mothers.

How they still shudder when remembering
our backs pressed against spinning walls,

the vomit smeared across our lips.
How they flush when thinking of the blood

pooled in our faces. And while the machine
didn’t deliver new news of the womb,

didn’t fulfill the promise of tranquility
or enlightenment in those it centrifuged,

it did help us understand queasiness,
our stomachs sloshing to recreate

the sickness our mothers felt when they first learned
of our presence. Nausea as the sensation of the body

carrying a foreign body. The first few months,
bright and terrifying, like staring into the sun.

Unfamiliar like Compazine or sticks of raw ginger.
What our mothers swallowed to have us.

Everything they buried. Would it surprise us
that they hid away their shame too

when wiping our chins after?
Is disgust encoded epigenetically?

When rescuers released twenty beached whales,
they were shocked to find the pod swimming back.

Prostrating themselves on the sand.
Two, three times. The scientists were baffled,

but we had seen everything. How a body can persist
beyond anything that was ever in it.

What could prompt a mother to lie in the sun
and let her milk curdle.

Ting Gou is a psychiatry resident at Baylor College of Medicine. Her first chapbook, The Other House, was published last year by Blue Lyra Press, and her poems can be found or are forthcoming in the Bellevue Literary Review, Best of the Net, Ghost Ocean Magazine, Superstition Review, The Pinch, Word Riot, and elsewhere. She is working on a collection of poems inspired by the mockumentary “The Centrifuge Brain Project,” which documents a fictional amusement park built for research.
Her Twitter handle is: @tinggou

It turned out that Jared, the tragic youngster we were picking up, died in the ocean. He was sailing on the Atlantic when a storm flipped his boat and sent the crew’s bodies up the Florida coast, slashed and bloodless. By this I came to assume that he loved whales, too.